The present invention relates to a blood collection tube management system which is equipped with a storage unit for storing a variety of data items and manages blood collection tubes for use in a vacuum blood collection method by determining which blood collection tube was used for which blood collection subject.
In hospitals and other medical institutions, the following practice is performed. When a predetermined blood test is performed based on a symptom complaint by a patient (blood collection subject), blood sample is collected from the patient into a blood collection tube by the vacuum blood collection method in a blood collection room of the hospital, for example. The blood sample is sent to a clinical laboratory in the hospital or to a laboratory center outside the hospital where the blood sample is subjected to the predetermined blood test, the results of which are reported.
At this time, the patient, the blood collection tube and the examination items must be reliably correlated. If any one of these items should be erroneously correlated, the patient needs to have his/her blood sampled over again and is subjected to increased burden. In the worst case, the patient may be wrongly diagnosed.
In this connection, there have been proposed systems which are adapted to obviate an error in correlating the patient, the blood collection tube and the examination items. (See, for example, Japanese Patent Publication No. 3226750, paragraphs 0030 to 0033 and Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. H9(1997)-34361, paragraphs 0016 and 0020.) JP 3226750 discloses a system where one of the two labels including a barcode and previously affixed to a blood collection tube is separated therefrom and is affixed on a predetermined column of a test card carrying the examination items, the name of a test subject and the like so that the correspondence between the blood collection tube and the test card is determined by reading the barcodes on these labels. Further, JP H9(1997)-34361 discloses a blood collection tube to which a label with a barcode encoding at least a container type, a management number and the like and formed of a transparent material is affixed. This document suggests that correlation between this blood collection tube and a test request form indicating the examination items can be established by assigning a barcode to both the blood collection tube and the test request form.